If we examine any issue of minority rights, i.e. Issues connected with a multiethnic or multicultural society in Europe today we have to be fully conscious that we are facing today a completely new situation.

Already for a very long time almost the whole of Europe has become an immigration area. Thus the problem of the cohabitation of minority groups with the majority is now regularly discussed under the label - not of cohabitation of different established ethnicities in a larger state whole, but - integration of growing numbers of migrants.

Now it was clear as well that with the fall of the east west divide borders not only in Europe but worldwide would become more open, at least more open towards Western Europe. Thus the pressure of immigration was for a long time felt ever more heavily in Europe and that it would explode was foreseeable. It then boiled over in the current refugee crisis. Thus the problem of cohabitation in harmony of a majority society with minority groups is today an ever pressing one.

As the problem presents itself in Europe today there are four major interconnected factors which aggravate the situation and actually, as I see it, frustrate a reasonable solution. 1) before the present boiling point politics intentionally turned a blind eye towards the realities of immigration and concentrated rather on hiding the problems from the public than trying to attack them.2) Hiding the immigration problem from the public, of course, implied not creating any viable legal instruments to deal with it. 3)The adaptation of the asylum laws to immigration already created the division between (very few) good vs. (very many) bad immigrants. And those bad economic immigrants: where did they come from? They came from African and from Muslim countries. Thus, as people of colour, from countries we had colonized and despised for centuries. 4) We were confronted with a culture that seemed for ages to clash with all majority values of our society.

To sum up: without a substantial change in economic policy from so called austerity to investing in the future and caring the social needs of all members of society we shall never achieve peaceful integration. Thus the larger picture unfortunately is a very bleak one.